Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced this week that he plans to retire sometime over the next year. This is pretty big, considering he's been with the company for 33 years and saw it through many stages of technological growth. So how would he sum up three decades of working with one of the largest tech players in the industry?

ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley was able to talk with Ballmer after the announcement of his retirement, and asked him to reflect on his time with Microsoft as well as what he thinks the future of the company holds.

Over the course of his career, Ballmer said his biggest accomplishment at Microsoft has been contributing to the rise of personal computing, from PCs to smartphones/tablets and everything in between.

"I'm proud of being I would say a significant part even of the birth of intelligent personal computing, the notion that people use computing technologies, whether that's phones, PCs," sid Ballmer. "I mean, we kind of birthed that over the course of the '80s and the '90s, and that's had such an unbelievable impact on people's lives. I would say a billion plus people and now more with phones, even if they're not all our phones, I'm very proud of what we've accomplished there.

"If I had to sort of couple it, I'm very proud that we were able to make this incredible impact on the planet and at the same time do a good job for our shareholders."

However, Ballmer's biggest regret over the course of his career was the operating system that many users despised: Windows Vista.

"Oh, you know, I've actually had a chance to make a lot of mistakes, and probably because, you know, people all want to focus in on period A, period B, but I would say probably the thing I regret most is the, what shall I call it, the loopedy-loo that we did that was sort of Longhorn to Vista," said Ballmer. "I would say that's probably the thing I regret most. And, you know, there are side effects of that when you tie up a big team to do something that doesn't prove out to be as valuable."

Ballmer said he has been thinking about retiring for awhile now, but started taking the idea more seriously over the last few months. The official decision was made only two days ago, he said.

Over the next year -- leading up to Ballmer's retirement -- Microsoft's board will talk about the company's needs and determine who the next CEO should be. Ballmer didn't give any clues as to who the successor may be, but said that the search could take less than a year.

As for Ballmer's future, he doesn't have any set plans right now.

"I haven't spent a lot of time -- I don't have time to spend actually even thinking about what comes next. I'm not going to have time to do that until the board gets a successor in place," said Ballmer. "My whole life has been about my family and about Microsoft. And I do relish the idea that I'll have another chapter, a chapter two, if you will, of my life where I'll get to sort of experience other sides of life, learn more about myself, all of that, but it's not like I leave with a specific plan in mind."

Ballmer joined Microsoft on June 11, 1980 as the company's 30th employee and the first business manager hired by Microsoft Chairman and Co-Founder Bill Gates. Even though Ballmer has been a public figure for Microsoft for many years, some believe the company is in need of an executive shake-up -- including a new leader. Mobile technology, such as smartphones and tablets, are taking over as the PC market continues to decline. But Microsoft has had a difficult time stirring up enthusiasm for Windows Phone against competitors like Apple and Samsung, and the Windows maker was late to the tablet game -- releasing its Surface tablet in October 2012 after the iPad had already been out for over two years. To make matters worse, Microsoft's Surface was initially released with the Windows RT operating system (the full Windows 8 Pro-powered Surface wasn't released until February 2013) and it was a major flop. Many say RT isn't a full Windows 8 experience, lacking the ability to run legacy apps.

Microsoft also slipped up recently with its Xbox One announcement. The new console, which is expected to be released this fall, initially had a used games ban and a new "always-on" digital rights management (DRM) system, which posed a problem for many people who are either in rural areas with slow Internet connections, travelling or tend to experience Internet issues with providers. Microsoft later retracted these features after major complaints, but the fiasco still didn't sit well with gamers.

The situation was made worse when its top competitor -- Sony's upcoming PlayStation 4 -- was announced without any used game bans or a DRM system, and is also faster and less expensive (by $100) than the Xbox One.

Perhaps a new CEO and executive shake-up will help Microsoft along. Nevertheless, Ballmer has been an important figure at Microsoft for years and helped make it what it is today.

vista looks like the pinnacle of os evolution since processors are capped at this point until they start making 3d sctructured processors with huge amount of cores, operating system isnt going to evolve much. windows xp is still in huge numbers, there might be some security scares but if so much people still use it its not that bad, what is ms sticked to even updating for example something like win98 to be as secure as possible for mobile phone use instead of cramming vista on those tiny devices and then breaking com[patibility yet again with something like windows rt.

linux of course might overtake windows in that case, but i doubt it since so much of software is closed in and linux isnt really going to make it more perople oriented with regards to ease of use. but all in all if windows foer xample turned into some minimal os that you are greeted with a web interface to buy additional services, secuirity wise and just as a longer term viosion is much more productive than having thousands of poeple spending their time on a product with features that gets tossed out the door on the next realese, windows should reamin a core operating system that basically lets you choose which features you want and downloding latest components from the web, less security issues.

of course there is just an issue do we really need so much people working on the next version of something like even media center or wmp or ie, its all free just like vlc so what does it do its not very essential at this point no one is going to use it offline off the bat just to use pc to browse some movies, so even something like windows media player will probably at least gets updated with windows update on first use, and even if its missing, worst case scenario, i still dont really see a point in having so much components that arent core part of os, its less secure, not used by vast majority of people and just all around bad design, dont forget there are still people dedicated to develop all these component that could instead do something more productive like web 2.0 integration of windows. so if we never see another version of windows media player, i highly doubt that it will be the end for all, its just overbloated design from the past where internet never existed. restructure windows to be part of web 2.0, more secure more integrated with internet, move all the people working on offline features like windows media player and other non essential components like that. i bet even if they have no skills in web 2.0 integration, at this point it would still be more productive to get rid of things like windows media player out of the os.

again its all about moving those people working ion archaic legfacy features and giving the proper time to intergarete windows into web 2.0. not firing them. a team has its limit and with thousands of pople working on windows, all those legacy archaic pre web 2.0 components are dragging the whole team down instead of competing with other companies like google that have all their services highly uptodate and integrated with the web. offline features are dead.